Arnold stared at the changing scenery outside the window, from the relatively green suburbs to the concrete jungle of the vertical city. It was within his expectations to see some sci-fi stuff when entering the city; his eyes were homing on every interesting detail foreign to him. June, who was driving the car, was amused by the childlike curiosity shown by the lanky man, easily more than a head taller than her. She has a few months of memories of the man recorded in her neural memory, his clear cluelessness and obliviousness to the common knowledge of the world easily stood out among the rest of her memory about him. He appeared to know some aspects of normal life but his knowledge only revolved around Dolls, even then his knowledge about dolls was flawed or very idealistic. It wasn't uncommon for humans to empathize with dolls, but his view on dolls was especially romanticized, not to the extent of worship but high enough that some might think he doesn't know the difference between Dolls and Humans. Yet she knew that the man himself had a line drawn clearly to separate between a Doll and a Human, he was very much aware of the difference between the two unlike some staff in the ward speculated.
Remembering the night when she was officially assigned as Arnold's caretaker by the founder, Howard Morrison himself. June initially thought that Arnold was someone influential seeking some kind of refuge in the mental ward, but after she read his file and interacted with him daily, she was wrong in many ways about her initial thoughts about him. His background remains unknown for the most part, what identifier he had on him only sprouts more questions than it gives answers. From what she knew, he had lived from the time before the collapse disaster and his hometown was currently inside the black zone. Some prodding for information came out fruitless, either because the man was very secretive about his past or he simply had no memory of it, the lack thereof information prevented her neural brain from making a clear picture of his past.
His desire to go outside was hardly a surprise and even was awaited by the founder, her conversion procedure was already prepared months prior in case Arnold showed interest in the outside world. The Car, new IDs, Weapons, everything was already prepared merely two months after his admission into the mental ward, there was even some contingency plan prepared in case of the "unknown" aiming after Arnold. Some staff even his wife, the co-founder Paris Morrison questioned his seemingly impulsive decision regarding Arnold Swanlake, but Howard Morrison didn't care or he did care but decided to still go through with his decision. June imagined a mental ward requesting a T-doll conversion would fish some attention, it was, but she heard the founder managed to smooth over the concerned parties with some excuses and means, probably some hush money. June's personal opinion, while Arnold has been an interesting fellow for the past few months, there has been nothing happened to warrant this degree of precaution that involves things unrelated to medical fields, like T-dolls and firearms.
But the logic behind the founder's decision mattered little to her, as a Doll, she would fulfil every purpose given to her. Her purpose involving a person she cared for was a plus in her library, technically speaking, she was happy with the current situation. It might be within her neural programming as a nursing Doll to care for the human under her care, but she thinks her interest in him lies beyond her predetermined behaviour as a nursing doll, the personality module? She doesn't really care about the details, honestly. Her Neural brain wasn't made for her to keep questioning the intricacies of her own existence. That kind of stressful thinking was reserved for humans and Dolls who had extra unused bandwidth in their neural brains to think about inefficient matters.
Her current high-priority target was the VIP of Paris and Morrison Sanctuary where she worked and her new official Human Owner. Yesterday was the day that her ownership was officially transferred to Arnold because while the founder managed to sweep the T-doll matter under the rug, a mental ward owning a T-doll would still pose a problem in the long run. June was told not to let Arnold know about this ownership transfer until the time was right, she doesn't know what this means in the slightest, but it was said that it involves Arnold's safety so she complied. Also, while she was officially under Arnold's name, she still works for P&MS , there might be something related to this fact about why she was told not to let him know about this arrangement.
While her logic software was trying to piece the puzzle together despite the lack of puzzle pieces to complete it, Arnold suddenly asked something from the passenger seat.
"Miss June, to be honest, I don't really know what I want to do in the city."
After being satisfied with seeing the hustle and bustle of the city, Arnold fixed his sitting position visibly annoyed by the traffic jam they're caught in. He fiddled with his phone, swiping the digital map left, right, up, and down, seemingly looking for something while in reality was looking for nothing in particular… He was just bored. Traffic jams were boring as hell even in the other world. He was disappointed that even in a futuristic world he would still have to suffer from traffic jams.
In boredom, he then opened a gallery and looked at a specific which dictates his current life. It was a picture containing details of his new identity, he retained his original name but he was now listed as someone who was born and raised in Germany, quite a jump from someone who was originally an American in blood and soul. As it appears, his original identity was quite impossible in this world, he read some books and found out that his hometown was quite close to the ground zero of the apocalypse mumbo jumbo. Another point that makes him regret forgetting the lore of GFL, it's true that he was away from the game for a long time, but he doubts that his brain's memory was that bad to forget something this big from the game he used to obsess daily.
Looking at Nurse June, she appears to be lost in thought after hearing his question. It wasn't for long though; she was about to talk when suddenly some cars in front of them blasted away after an explosion. After the explosion, a chorus of hysteric cries and agitated honks from cars who wanted to get away as soon as possible followed, multiple cars collided with each other unintendedly locking each other in place, and some drivers left their car to escape on foot. As if the chaos wasn't enough, a series of explosions suddenly erupted from a nearby building, spreading debris and fire to its surroundings, it was then followed by numerous gunshots exchanged between unknown parties.
"Holy shit! …I don't remember any of this…"
It's not like he remembered anything from the game aside from his waifus. He wouldn't know whether something happened in front of him happened in the game or a completely new thing that differs from the game timeline.
June who was sitting beside him already had her newly issued rifle, A Calico M100, loaded with rounds and ready to fire. Looking at the stuck still state of the cars, she concluded that escaping on foot would be the most effective solution than trying to force the car to unstuck itself from the traffic. After telling her idea to Arnold who obediently followed, both of them exited the car and tried to walk the opposite way of where the gunshots came from. But Lady Luck seemed to be mocking their attempt to escape when a group of armed people emerged from God knows where.
Those armed people once saw June with her rifle immediately opened fire haphazardly. Some fired their firearms while standing still without cover, others fired their guns from behind cover without looking at the target at all, causing them to shoot in a completely different direction to their target. They are fighting as chaotic as a headless chicken with a burnt butt, they even missed Arnold who popped his head out of the cover like a moron trying to look at his surroundings.
After pulling Arnold back into cover, June returned fire with the precision of a trained marksman, Howard Morrison paid good money to install the best firing module money can buy. So, despite June still using a civilian doll mainframe, her lack of Bonafide Tactical Doll sturdiness, she makes up for it with her top performance in weapon handling. She easily picked off the opponents one by one, but just when it looked like the enemy number had dwindled, suddenly reinforcement came showing their ugly heads from the annals of hell. They come from trickling into the battlefield replacing their downed allies, some even come from behind, it was a pincer attack.
Their performance was still bad like before, but the sheer volume of their shots made returning fire impossible without receiving a scratch.
June despite being pinned down managed to sneak in a few counterfire which took down enemies who tried to get close.
To her side, Arnold was hyperventilating as his brain worked in overdrive trying to process his situation. The whizzing sound of bullets over his head and the sound of metal colliding with bullets froze him in a spot like a deer caught in a headlight. His main focus was the slowly regenerating HP bar of his, he was hit by a bullet at the initial encounter with the hostiles. He felt the heavy and deadly shock of the bullet hitting his body with cold cruelty, yet the feeling of pain was absent entirely. None of the painful consequences of being hit by a bullet registered in his brain, other than knowing that he was hit by something and seeing his Hit point going down. He wanted to laugh at this new fact about his system which was revealed to him, yet he wondered if he was just dreaming and in reality, he was lying dead on the road, bleeding out from his gun wound.
"J-June! Am I dead? I got shot, I'm dead, am I?"
"You didn't get shot, Sir Arnold. You're alive. Please stay down, I will be getting you out of here safely."
June doesn't know about his system, so from her perspective, since there was no wound on Arnold's body, he wasn't shot.
"Y-yeah, I'm not dead, I'm still alive. But I'm not s-safe yet. June! Is there anything I can do?"
"Just stay down and don't put yourself in danger, that is enough."
June flashed him a warm smile as she took cover to reload her rifle. Her letterman jacket already had some tears in some place, undoubtedly from the shot she received when trading shots with the enemy, but because she was a Doll, she didn't bleed like a human does. But the damage she sustained was clearly taking its toll on her as her performance worsened as more of her jacket tore apart, showing the skintight black suit underneath.
Their situation was dire but it still could get worse, with the enemy slowly making their way to get closer despite June's precise shots barely keeping them at bay. Soon, as June was getting overwhelmed by her body's accumulating damage and the enemy's superior number, the pincher attack would evolve into full encirclement and by then their fate would be sealed. They had to do something to get away as quickly as possible before the enemy managed to completely surround them and drown them in a hail of bullets.
While June was desperately firing at the enemy from cover, Arnold was fussing about what he could do to help their escape. But his panicked condition prevented him from making a clear-headed decision, his inexperience in such a situation also hampered his ability to make a plan. Then suddenly from a nearby alleyway, a single armed person came out with his rifle which seemed to be a variant of an AK platform. The enemy aimed his gun towards June and Arnold who were late to notice his existence.
June was reloading her rifle when she noticed an enemy in the alleyway. In what felt like an eternity as she forced her damaged doll frame to reload faster, she noticed Arnold who raised his hand with his index finger pointing at the hostile enemy. She didn't know what Arnold was trying to do, but her thoughts were cut short as the enemy fired his rifle and then the recoil of a body hit by a bullet came from Arnold's body. Yet despite being hit the centre body mass by a gun, Arnold's body didn't crumble and kept pointing his finger towards the enemy until the unexpected happened, a speck of fire formed on the tip of his finger before it launched itself at high speed toward the enemy. The enemy who didn't expect retaliation received the speck of fire to his chest and was blown away towards the wall before crumpling down like a wet paper.
"Sir! Are you okay?!"
In an uncharacteristic panic, June stopped any attempt to return fire to check on Arnold. From the way his body recoiled, she was sure he was hit yet he was unscathed, not even his clothes were damaged. Her neural brain stalled for a bit trying to process what had just happened.
Not noticing June's confusion, Arnold tugged on her sleeve while pointing towards the alleyway, despite his stutter he was trying to tell her about the possible escape route. He still couldn't believe that he could tank some gunshots, he did cast a magic shield, but still being a low-levelled skill, it only managed to block a few shots before shattering, after that, he had no choice but to receive the shots subsequent shots with his body as he charging his firebolt. By the time he shot his charged firebolt, his HP bar was already beeping red and only one shot away from depleting. Luckily, his firebolt arrived first before the enemy fired another shot or Arnold would be screwed.
Giving up on trying to articulate his words, Arnold cast another Magic shield creating a transparent dome around him and dragged the confused June by hand towards the alleyway. Every time the dome was destroyed, he immediately cast another one until they reached the dark alleyway safely despite the heavy enemy fire.
0o0o0
Both were running through the alleyway with haste, uncaring of direction as long as they were heading away from the battlefield. Arnold was leading the way while wielding the AK he scavenged from the downed enemy, while June was closely following behind while lost in her thoughts.
A while ago, as she was being pulled by hand towards the alleyway. Her optic module which was being put in overdrive in response to the high-stakes battlefield, managed to catch some details which would be normally unnoticed by eyes. This ability allows her to process the information on the battlefield at lightning speed, it allows her to perceive the battlefield almost like it was in a slow motion which in turn, heightens her energy consumption rate and her risk of overheating. During this state, while she was being dragged by Arnold, she noticed multiple bullets being stopped mid-flight by an unknown invisible forcefield. It was centered around Arnold with a diameter of roughly 3 meters and narrowing towards the top, probably a dome. While there had been a similar protective technology that existed before, as far as she knew Arnold currently didn't own any of it nor the technology was accessible for normal civilians to buy from a normal legal market. Also, from the gap between when the bullets were stopped and when the bullets could pass through, it means that there have been multiple reactivations of the said invisible forcefield during their hasty beelining toward the alleyway. She didn't see him using any kind of device to reactivate the protective force field all the while they were running, so it must have been activated internally or had an automated reactivation once destroyed, yet this theory also poses more questions about how It happened in the first place without any visible device to do it on his body.
There was also the firebolt that he shot towards the enemy, it was powerful enough to blow away an adult male towards the wall.
Compared to the months of her interaction with him in the mental ward, the few minutes of him inside an intense firefight managed to revise what she knew about him in her neural memory. From the initially harmless person to a person with substantial fighting ability after adding in the unknown factor, however, it was clear that Arnold wasn't used to being on a battlefield and neither was she, but June was able to receive secondary knowledge about being inside an active battlefield after receiving a copied neural memory from a deactivated Tactical Doll from the Third World War during her conversion into a T-doll. She wondered what else was hidden inside the true identity of the man in front of her…
0o0o0
Their travel inside the alleyway had come to an end when they reached another ransacked highway with similarly uniformed enemies and chaotic scenery. The difference was that they weren't surrounded this time and had a choice to flee towards another direction that was not the alleyway. But as fate had it, one of the enemies noticed them and alerted the others of their presence. The nearby enemy immediately focused on attacking the armed Arnold and June, which forced the two to hunker down behind the nearest car.
Since most of the enemy force was still focusing on attacking their initial objective, whatever it was, only a small amount of the combatant was firing angry leads towards them allowing for an effective return fire. June was still landing shots like a professional as expected, but Arnold was no slouch either, he had visited the firing range quite a lot of times before so he knew his way around guns, kind of. He still had apprehension about firing hot leads towards a living human being, but a difficult situation needed a difficult decision and survival was a basic instinct of any living being. Since it was a situation where it was either him or them, he managed to push through his apprehension and fired back towards his enemies.
Both of them fired their respective weapons while slowly moving backwards from car to car, gradually separating themselves from the active battlefield. It was then that Arnold's AK suddenly encountered a problem, it refused to fire despite him pulling the trigger, in frustration Arnold stared down the AK's barrel to see what was wrong with it… then he suddenly remembered an old word of advice from his father when going into the firing range with him a long time ago.
"Arnold here is a lesson about Firearm malfunction from me. If you pull the trigger and the gun doesn't fire despite having a round in the chamber, it is called the misfire which also can be either the case for a squib or a hang fire or something else. You'd be fine as long you don't aim it at people or stare down the barrel like a moron because only a moron would stare inside a gun barrel knowing there is live ammo in it. Smart people don't even stare down the barrel without live ammo in it. Only dumb people do because they're dumb."
"Oh.", Knowing his fatal mishap, in a split second he saw June's jawdropped at what he did then the next millisecond was him witnessing point-blank the immediate karma for dumbs. He might be imagining it, but he might've heard his father screaming "YOU FOOL!" from another world.
0o0o0
A/n: Short chapter as my ritual to get Wawa... I still don't know what to name the city, lol
Maybe just leave it to just some random unnamed city somewhere in Germany? I HAVE NO IDEA! HAHAHAHAHA! *cue tf2 medic ost
Also prayed to God that there wouldn't be typos that I would notice later because I'm too lazy now to re-check, because sometimes importing doc file into doc manager sent some shit into the void for some reason...
edit: Nothing fixed, just a fun fact, I noticed in my fanfics that involve firearms, I had a pattern of creating a gunfight in chapter 2 or 3 early in the story, lol
edit 2: I adjusted Arnold's height a bit, I accidentally made him a slenderman, lol (7 feet my ass, lmao)
